平川 真



School of Informatics and Data Science
Graduate School of Education, Psychology Course

Think about "mind" from the standpoint of data.

Why do people understand indirect meanings?

I am engaged in psychological studies on communication. Say, for example, you can ask someone to open the window by just saying "it's hot in here." Such indirect expression itself cannot be literally understood as a request, but most people can perceive that you are making a request. My studies relate to why people use language in such a manner and understand indirect meanings.

Data-based inferencing of the unobservable "mind"

Psychology tries to make inferences regarding the "mind," a target which cannot be observed, based on observable data. Coming up with a hypothesis on complicated human behavior, verifying the hypothesis by experiment and research, and creating a mathematical model capable of psychological interpretation are very interesting works. Let me introduce one of my past studies. If one is asked why people make a request in an indirect way, the most common answer would be "to be polite to a person that you are talking to." However, a data-based study showed that "to be polite" was not a very appropriate explanation. Rather, "to find someone who cares about you" turned out to be in better agreement with the data. Although a single study cannot reveal everything at once, I find it very interesting to discover a sensible way of understanding the invisible "mind" via data.

Learn methodologies for generating knowledge via data

Our Data Science Course focuses on data analysis based on statistics. For gaining reasonable knowledge of phenomena that you might be interested in, the skill to analyze data accurately depending on the purpose would be a very useful tool. This skill can be applied to variety of phenomena, and my studies on the human mind are just examples of utilization of this skill. Why not join us to learn general methodologies for generating knowledge from data?